So they say the LinkedIn IPO has created a bit of a rush to IPO for the rest of them. If it’s true that we’re in a new market now, and that LinkedIn’s IPO was the beginning of a rush of IPOs for valid social networking candidates, then the next few years could be interesting for the Valley.

Market and economic conditions are not as they were in 2000. So If, and this is still only an “if” at this point, investors want to shepherd their best to market now, there will be pressure on companies to tighten up. Increase traction and retention among users/customers. Improve brand loyalty. Differentiate from close competitors. Focus in on what makes them different. And so on.

The inventive years, then, may be drawing to a bit of an end. *If* we have entered IPO season. Time now to refine, polish, and perfect the product. To hold on to the team and to begin eyeing the exits for opportunities. And to watch the competition and get the ear to the ground to listen for the rumble of oncoming industry rollups.

Interesting times, then, for a lot of companies, *if* it is that time. For the geo-local and local-social and social-deals marketplaces are far from being done. Groupon has only just declared its intent to socialize deals. Gowalla, SCVNGR, and Foursquare continue to find the most extensible and leverage-able social practices with which to integrate merchant offerings (loyalty, dynamic deals, real-timeliness, etc).

Social games are not yet through — if anything, only just beginning. Narrow social gamification based on badges and achievements (Gowalla, SCVNGR, Foursquare) stands in sharp contrast to the more open gamification of social represented by EmpireAvenue.

Both hint at the possibilities of connecting online or offline merchant business, customer relationships, and to some extent the social graph, to interaction models. In the case of Foursquare/SCVNGR/Gowalla these interactions are incentive based and hew closely to actual user activities.

But EmpireAvenue shows that you can go meta on this. Game the game and with use of a transaction engine, create new connections and thus new channels and relationship opportunities. (The question “so what” and “what for” stands — but this is not a phenom to write off as silly gaming. Players are real, brands are real, and therefore inventiveness will be real, too.)

It will be interesting to see what comes next. If there’s a mad dash for the exits, and companies in the social networking space spend the next couple years not on whiteboards but with lawyers, then a pity, perhaps, for things will simply not be as interesting. Startup founders will shift focus, necessarily, inwards and towards company well-being. Innovation will take a back seat. For success in an IPO rush is measured at the open, not by innovation.

Interesting, indeed. Let’s hope that the rush is not on for everyone now. Let’s hope that it’s not that time yet. When the Valley reveals its secret Vegas. When the ‘ad’ separates from the ‘venture.’ When silicon turns green.

This month we review books about ubiquitous computing design and content strategy.

Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design

Type: practical
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 978-0123748997
Details: 336 pages, paperback

Get the book

For years people have talked about ubiquitous computing and how it will change our lives. It has taken time for this technology to move from the academic and experimental phase of development to being part of our everyday experience. Now that the revolution has started, designers should observe and understand how to design for ubiquitous computing. To fill this need, Mike Kuniavsky has written a book called “Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design.”

Eighty percent of the user experience books I own start with the history of our field and the definition of user experience. So does this book, but this is the first time in years that I actually read these chapters. Here Kuniavsky provides a clear explanation of the position that ubiquitous computing holds in this history. After this he gives his definition of and differences between identity, interface, industrial, interaction, information and service design. And while I heard about most of these before, understanding his view on this was helpful.

In the book, Kuniavsky takes us on a ride through many different ubiquitous computing projects. He explains each project in detail and gives us insights into technology, design choices, marketing decisions and reasons behind the success or failure. This approach really helps you understand what ubiquitous computing exactly is, which is important since it can be so much and so little at once. Writing in this way helps the reader to get a good understanding, but I also thought it missed some details. People with lots of experience in interaction design will probably get inspired by this, but will not learn a lot of new information.

Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content

Type: practical
Publisher: New Riders Press
ISBN: 978-0321733016
Details: 240 pages, paperback

Get the book

In Clout, the author Colleen Jones concisely outlines the methods and techniques that will aid the development of a successful content strategy. There are numerous real-world examples that support the core principles of context, rhetoric and psychology. She advises content creators to turn off their “fire hose” of information and provides effective and proven techniques to reach people.

Not only does Clout suggest organizations change the way they think before they begin to solve customer engagement issues; it may also require some readers that they change the way they think before they read it. Jones delicately introduces elements of psychology and sociology to explain the science of influence. The best SEO or A/B testing tools will not heal a company’s reputation or convince customers to trust your content’s voice. Investing in a new psychology will.

I like Clout because it teaches how and why to create influential content. I also love the fact that Colleen Jones takes the time to review the principles of rhetoric and psychology, principles at the heart of influential content, before mapping it all out and discussing practical tactics to develop influential content.

There is so much valuable information in Jones’ book that I want to summarize it all in this review, but I won’t. She has written a beautiful and good overview of what it takes to apply a good content strategy, without making things too complicated. This book can be used by web designers and content strategists, but is also a great gift for clients.

Every few months, a slew of articles and blog posts come out addressing the universal issue of getting stakeholder buy-in or obtaining the ever elusive sign-off on your design. They provide great advice regarding building relationships, utilizing preventative measures, and remembering to be patient.

We are all consultants

What the articles often assume, but fail to mention concretely, is that design as a profession is a consulting business. Although we are responsible for actually executing on a vision, we still seek final approval elsewhere. Regardless of your role, be it “inny”, “outie”, or freelance, each one of us is a consultant to a client. That client may be an individual, department, or an entire organization. According to Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting, “A consultant is a person in a position to have some influence over an individual, a group, or an organization, but who has no direct power to make changes or implement programs,” (emphasis original).

This fundamental understanding is important because our business, and ultimately the most difficult part of our job, is the business of influencing others. As designers we often feel frustrated because want the direct control, and may even act like we have it. Yet for a design project to be successful, a designer needs to function and behave differently than a decision maker. A good first step is to enter the project with the mindset and understanding that since you are not the decision maker, you can’t force anyone to do what you suggest. As a consultant, however, you can advice, recommend, and influence to the best of your abilities.

Many people look for procedural ways to more effective at consulting and influencing others, but such guidance rarely exists because a large aspect of consulting is “that your own self is involved in the process to a much greater extent than if you were applying your expertise in some other way. Your own reactions to a client, your own feelings during discussions, your own ability to solicit feedback from the client – all are important dimensions to consultation.”.

Thus, as consultants we are often operating on two planes. We are on the one hand operating at the substance level where we are attempting to rationally understand the client’s problem and recommending solutions. At the same time, we are also operating on an affective level, where we generate and sense our own feelings, as well as those of the client. It is crucial that as consultant, we pay attention to the second level.

Resistance is Futile Natural

As consultants, it is natural for us to think that if we present our designs clearly and logically, provide data to support our decisions, and truly have the client’s best interests at heart, that we will get the buy-in and support that we are seeking. We often believe this because we are not paying enough attention to the affective level until we begin to run into resistance.

Resistance is the point when we begin to lose forward momentum on the project, and start to believe that the client is being short-sited, stubborn, or irrational. In fact, resistance is an emotional process occurring within the client, and has absolutely nothing to do with all the rational data and justification that you have just presented. Although it may seem that the resistance is aimed directly at you, its important to not take it personally. If you are facing resistance, it is a sign that you have touched upon something important or valuable, and caused an emotional process to occur within the client. The client is resisting as a way to defend against having to make a difficult or unpopular decision, confront an organizational problem, or deal with a personal reality that they have been trying to emotionally avoid.

According to Block, “resistance is predictable, natural, and necessary part of the learning process. When as consultants we wish resistance would never appear or would just go away, we are, by that attitude, posing an obstacle to the client’s really integrating and learning from our expertise.”

Managing Resistance

The key to managing resistance is to understand that resistance is emotional discomfort expressed indirectly, and once we help our clients express these feelings directly, they will be able to more readily accept and use our advice.

There are three steps to helping our clients express themselves directly:

1. Identify that resistance is taking place
2. Name the resistance in a neutral way
3. Leave room for a response

The best way to identify that resistance is taking place is to use your own feelings as a gauge. Are you having an important conversation with a client, but are feeling irritated or bored? If so, take a step back and in your own mind attempt to identify what form the resistance is taking place.

Resistance has many faces depending on the individual as exemplified below:

• Questioning Methodology – You are preparing to conduct a research or usability study and your client is questioning your methodology. Although some questioning is legitimate to understand your approach, if the questioning continues for more than 10 minutes, you may be facing resistance.
• Lack of Surprise – Perhaps you have conducted your research and are presenting findings back to the client. They respond by saying, “I am not surprised”, as if being surprised is the worst thing that could happen to them. The client’s fear of surprise is actually their desire to always be in control, and thus guard themselves against having to face up to a difficult emotional reality.
• Give Me More Detail – You are presenting sketches of your designs to discuss potential approaches, and the client keeps pressing you for more and finer bits of information. Regardless of how much information you give the client, it is never enough, and they don’t want to proceed until they get their latest request for more detail. When you start to get impatient with the questions, even though you are able to answer them, that is the moment to suspect resistance.
• Impracticality – As you design, you continually communicate and present designs in various stages of fidelity to your client. At every instance, the client reminds you that they “live in the real world and are facing real world problems” accusing you of being impractical. Although there may be some truth in this statement, the emphasis on practicality may lead you to suspect that you are up against an emotional issue.
• Compliance – One of the most difficult forms of resistance to identify is compliance. The client is agreeing to all your suggestions, everything is going swimmingly; they are the best clients ever! However, it’s not natural for a client to have no feedback or reservations. If those reservations are not expressed to you directly, they will come out in another, perhaps more destructive way. It is important to recognize this form of resistance and help the client express their reservations directly.

Once you have identified the resistance in your own mind, the next step is to name it to the client in a neutral way. The way you name the resistance is important, as you want to be sensitive to the client’s emotional process and not put them on the defensive. For example, if a client is being compliant you might say, “You seem to go along with all of my recommendations. I am having a hard time understanding your real feelings about this design”.

Once you name the resistance, you have to leave room for the response by quite literally not saying anything until your client responds. There might be an awkward silence where you will feel tempted to jump in and start rambling, but the goal of naming the resistance is to allow the client to express their feelings directly so that the project may be able to move forward.

Most of the time, naming the resistance will open up a channel for direct communication. Yet on occasion, naming the resistance won’t help, in those cases its best to start with your own feelings. You could say, “I feel very frustrated by this discussion”. The client may ask you why you feel this way, and it will open the door to get you to a direction discussion of the problem.

Sometimes It’s Not Resistance

Finally, it is important to remember that when a client disagrees with you or pushes back, it is not always resistance. Sometimes they just disagree with you, or don’t truly buy-in to your point of view. We can all become paranoid and believe that every objection is resistance. It is important to remember that resistance is discomfort expressed indirectly, so if a client says “This approach would put me in a vulnerable position politically, and I do not want to proceed in this manner”, they are being quite direct and honest about their feelings, and are not resisting you in any way. Although it might be disappointing, you should feel appreciative of the client’s direct expression and also know where you stand with the client.

Summary

As consultants, some of the hardest and most rewarding work that we can do is advise, recommend, and educate. Once we accept that resistance is a natural part of the process – and not take it personally – we will be much more effective in getting buy-in, as well as truly help the client to learn from our expertise. Much of resistance management hinges on being attune to the affective level of the conversation and relationship. It also about openness and awareness of our feelings, while helping the client express theirs directly. To finish with another quote from Block:

authentic behavior with a client means you put into words what you are experiencing with the client as you work. This is the most powerful thing you can do to have the leverage you are looking for to build client commitment.

Several major trends are emerging that affect interaction design. With the advent of post-PC devices like the iPad, cheap sensors and microcontrollers like the Arduino, and services like Kindle Wispersync, we’re in the middle of a shift towards ubiquitous computing, tangible interaction, and cloud services. Because of these trends, our field must consider the integration of the traditionally separate areas of screen and tangible interaction design.

Of particular significance is the shift away from the generic computation typified by the “personal computer,” which never really achieved the individuality or specificity implied by the term “personal.” In short, we’re experiencing the emergence of The New Ecology of Things, where a network of heterogeneous, smart objects and spaces are replacing our current design context.

The Past – The Personal Computer Has Made Us Soulless

There are signs that all is not well with our day-to-day work life. John Hockenberry’s 2008 review of photographer Michael Wolf’s The Transparent City contemplates the crushing homogeneity and conformity of modern work. Among Wolf’s beautiful images of life seen through Chicago’s skyscrapers, Hockenberry observes “12 random floors of eggshell white, computer screens on brown desks, and wall-hung bookshelves.”

The article goes on to discuss how the environment for “knowledge work” is unlike factories or workshops where the spaces are specifically suited to the activity of making things. The knowledge-working context has devolved to the point where “offices have become stacks of boxes for people who get paid to think out of them.” But I believe this is not only a problem of architecture and environmental design. Our daily activity has been squeezed into the narrow channel of interaction with the personal computer and its attendant posture, furniture, and detachment from the needs of the person. The digital tools we use have played a large role in creating this disembodied, deadening uniformity.

Chicago Office Buildings, Photo by Michael Wolf, The Transparent City, Aperture/MoCP; First Edition edition (November 1, 2008)

Similarly, Matthew B. Crawford has been driven out of the office and into his motorcycle repair shop as described in “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.” Crawford discusses how knowledge work has become vague and disconnected from the concrete, meaningful outcomes of manual labor. Again, I’d argue that it’s not only the kind of work, but also the manner in which the work is accomplished.

1973 Mototrans in his shop, Photo by Mattew B. Crawford, http://shockoemoto.com/

This disconnection from the physical isn’t limited to paper-pushing knowledge workers. It afflicts architects, designers, recording engineers and others whom we think of as having “satisfying” jobs where things are made. As creative workers, we’ve seen our day-to-day work compressed from a productive, bodily-engaged studio environment down to the almost motionless “mouse-crouch” that plugs us into the virtual. Seduced by the power of the personal computer, we’ve morphed from active, engaged, social, interactive people to sedentary, soulless slugs, perched in front of our glowing screens.

The personal computer and the interactions designed for it create a homogenous and context free environment removing the meaningful and productive character of acting and thinking in the embodied, physical environment. This needs to change.

The Emergent – Slabs: A Step Towards Re-Engagement

Android, Monome, the iPad, and soon Sifteos represent a new form of computing device that I call the slab. Slabs are hand-held, generic platforms with a range of sizes and capabilities – touch screen, GPS, accelerometer, gyro, WiFi, speaker, mic, etc. that, in effect, turn into something new with each different application they run.

Sifteo Blocks Use Downloadable Apps, Sifteo.com

Monome Configurable Music Controller, monome.org

Slabs are different from personal computers. First, because they have a smaller, simpler form factor and a direct, touch based interaction. Second, the device effectively becomes the app once it’s launched, and the separation between software, hardware and interaction dissolves. When you switch apps on a slab, you get a whole new device that engages you as a unified, tangible object. The app is the device. Third, slabs will be cheap enough to use multiple, networked devices simultaneously during an activity.

Adobe’s new Nav iPad app, http://www.photoshop.com/products/mobile/nav

Adobe’s new Color Lava iPad app, http://www.photoshop.com/products/mobile/colorlava

Finally, with slabs we can begin to disconnect from soulless trap of the (im)Personal Computer. We can re-engage with our environment and feel the physical consequences of our activity. Instead of being tied to a “workstation,” we move around the workspace, utilizing multiple slabs and their spatial relations to one another. We use specialized tools and work practices as slabs morph to the needs of each activity. We touch things again. Instead of losing ourselves in the virtual, we re-engage with people and things in the world. “Here, look” and “take this and work on it” become literal statements once again. Over time, we build a set of specialized tools appropriate to our practice (see the bespoke objects discussion below)

Hyun Ju Yang’s 2009 visualization from my Designer’s Affordances research project, http://hyunjuyang.com/#384088/self-reflective-learning

In addition to their embodied character, slabs excel at leveraging the affordances of computation and networks. Our digital work is no longer tied to a single workstation. The cloud enables our materials to manifest in different forms, on different devices, with activity-specific functionality.It’s the best of both worlds. A graphic designer could have a large, worktable slab for standing and working on layouts. Plus a lap sized slab to sit and edit an image in concentration. A narrow slab might sit on a table to keep track of a to-do list. And of course, the designer would use several 8 1/2″ x 11″ slabs at a client meeting to pass around the table for discussion.

The Emergent – Sofducts: A Challenge for Designers

The slab presents an interesting set of design challenges. Apps are screen-based software. Yet the app becomes more like a physical product once launched. This merging of app + slab leads to a hybrid I call the sofduct (software/product).

For example, GPS navigation systems have been sold in a box, physically shipped, with a warranty card and customer service phone number. Now, the sofduct version gives you the exact same functionality but is downloaded and runs on a slab as a piece of software. To the user, the end result looks and feels just like the traditional physical product. The sofduct is very disruptive in this way.

For one, whole business models are being destroyed by the sofduct. You can now buy the MotionX-GPS Drive app for $0.99, and get turn-by-turn navigation for $2.99 a month or $20/year. Moreover, in-app purchasing of add-ons and features creates a modular “product” model, where the sofduct is actually a range of product possibilities that can be selected and customized by the user. Can traditional GPS units and other physical products survive this kind of competition?

MotionX-GPS Drive App, http://news.motionx.com/category/motionx-gps-drive/

Screen designers need to re-frame practices understanding that a sofduct has to meet the expectations for a traditional product. Users will assume the high-finish aesthetics, ergonomics, tangibility, and conceptual integrity of physical product design. Likewise, simplicity and clarity of interaction are critical. The perception of “product-ness” will also influence user expectations for reliability and customer service – we want our products to simply work. Making this happen is traditionally the realm of product designers.

On the other side, product designers entering the sofduct realm need to understand the traditions and expectations for screens and software. The integration of dynamic media content is different from the static character of physical products, requiring a deep understanding of interaction, typography, content strategy, information architecture and visual design that’s the domain of screen-based interaction designers.

Apple GarageBand App, http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/

Plus, users want constant and rapid upgrades. Product design tries to get it perfect before launch, since there’s no turning back after you send the device to manufacturing. But with a sofduct, it may be better to put out a really good, but simpler version on the market quickly, and use a software model for product planning where upgrades are rolled out on a strategic schedule.

Sofducts are a new category for design, merging the focus, situated character, and physicality of an object with the malleability and media richness of software. This requires an integration of odd-couple disciplines – software practices with product design, screen design with haptics, interaction design with materials aesthetics, and content strategy with physical interactions. Further, new business and design opportunities emerge, and require a complete rethinking of design strategy and implementation.

The Future – Bespoke Objects

While slabs and sofducts are an emerging design landscape today, interaction designers need to prepare for further disruptions and repositioning of their skills in the future. Soon, trends in hardware and software will open up the possibility for low-cost, custom-built systems for individuals and specific applications. In the same way that one can have a bespoke suit tailored to a perfect fit and style, it may soon become possible to have a bespoke object with the hardware, software and interaction design tailored to the perfect fit and style for you and your intended use.

By this, I don’t mean the custom manufacturing typified by NIKEiD and others in recent years. What I do mean something literally like the local tailor, working out of a shop around the corner, who develops a personal and meaningful relationship with their customer and their needs. The production of bespoke objects on the local level is becoming possible because of rapid advances in desktop 3D printing, system-on-a-board components, open-source software and hardware, open source 3D parts libraries like Thingiverse, and the DIY culture growing around these trends.

MakerBot Thing-O-Matic $1,300 3D Printer, http://www.makerbot.com/

Bespoke Prosthetics, http://www.bespokeinnovations.com/

With cheap, off-the-shelf computational components (e.g. the just announced Android Open Accessory Kit that works with Arduino) and the ability to print 3D parts, the digital tailor will soon be able to hang their sign out and make individual or short-run custom objects full of ubicomp goodness. People will want these because a generic, mass-produced device won’t always be suited to their particular circumstance or activity. Moreover, having a custom designed ensemble of complementary, networked objects, specifically crafted to your way of working will be the hallmark of the enthusiast and professional alike. We’ll want to assemble our own unique ecologies of things, from watch-sized objects, through tablets, to interactive environments.

What does this mean for the interaction designer and design firms? In the same way sofducts are already disrupting design practices and business models, the decentralized, local model of bespoke objects will create additional changes for design.

The Bespoke Tailor, (I got this image off of a blog, unatributed)

I see a few opportunities. First, digital tailors are designers. Just because many components are off-the-shelf, bespoke objects will naturally have custom forms, behaviors and systems designed for a specific person or task. That’s the job of an interaction designer. So in the future, interaction designers may be the small business owners around the corner, selling both locally in person and internationally online.

Second, the off-the-shelf interactions, interfaces, systems-on-a-board, 3D models, etc. – i.e. the ecosystem around the bespoke object – all need design, and a market will develop for organizations to design and produce the virtual and physical components that enable the digital tailor to operate.

The New Ecology of Things

Twenty years ago, Mark Weiser published his seminal paper on ubiquitous computing in Scientific American, “The Computer in the 21st Century”. This remarkably prescient work predicts much of what’s becoming a reality today (and perhaps Apple’s iPad name is a tip-of-the-hat to Weiser’s taxonomy of tabs, pads, and boards). Yet this vision, along with Microsoft’s 2019 video have a homogeneity and sense of virtuality that does not capture the tangible, gritty, idiosyncratic, embodied, productive, and mythic character I hope for in The New Ecology of Things.

I think one of the most interesting challenges for interaction designers is to look beyond the screen, and imagine how we can help make digital life and work more engaged. We need to learn to design groups of computationally enhanced objects with interaction expressed not only through screens, but also through texture, kinetic behavior, haptics, sound, animism, light, and spatial location. This means bridging and synthesizing screen and tangible interactions in an evolved form of left+right brain, analytic+aesthetic, virtual+tactile Interaction Design.

The final — and main conference day — for UXLX saw 450 people from 32 different countries flock to the the Lisbon FIL centre to hear Don Norman, Christian Crumlish, Kristina Halvorson and more.

Beyond User Research: Building an organisational brain — Louis Rosenfeld

The first talk of the day really put a mark on the presentations that would follow. It was a talk about the elephant in the room in practically every design case I currently work on; big companies are usually chopped up in little departments and those departments do NOT communicate with each other. Lou held a strong plea that those departments should start working together in order to create a better user experience and outweigh your competition.

• Silos —Lou is a consultant in information architecture and visits lots of companies who need his help with getting their act together. Whenever he asks about search analytics, the voice of the user via the callcenter or usability research reports, most busineses have to ask three different departments about these things. There is nobody who connects theses “silos”, as Lou likes to call them. So if there is a Usability Research Silo and a Customer Support Silo, do you think they should be talking to each other? Or at least connect their findings in some way? Hell yes. And this is not only the case with research and analytics departments. Most of the time, the “brand strategy” is created in Silo A and the persona’s for the screen designs are written in Silo B. And these Silos also do not communicate with each other.
  These silos are missing out on the combinatorial effect: together they are better than the sum of both when viewed apart.
  So do we do with these silos? Well, let’s blow them up.
• Getting there — So how do we blow up these silos? First off, Lou tells us, you have to get out of yours. Visit some other Silos and find out what they know. Work together.

Lou concludes his talk with a few pointers you need to keep in mind when establishing a decision making organ. First off: blue sky it. Ask yourself, if you’re going to build a dicision making apparatus, what would it look like?

Next: Ban loaded terms and crutches from the discussion, like “omniture”, “user testing”, “market research” and so forth, because these words tend to take the discussion on roads your company has been walking on for too long.

And the bottom line: blow up the silos and put people together.
“Companies that integrate their silos of insight will outpace their competitors.

Playful Design/Design for Play  — Christian Crumlish

Play, like design, is both wonderful and available for multiple interpretations – something Christian Crumlish took full advantage of in his wide-ranging talk.

Starting off with the analogy of how print designers bemoaned the web’s lack of control, Crumlish suggests that we should be using the concept of play — its original meaning is ‘to dance’, which is apt as we should be thinking about allowing space. Play gives us masks, the chance to have an assumed identity, and the change to carry out re-imaginings (one entomologist is a dedicated participant in Civil War re-enactments to the point that he brings in era appropriate bugs to attack the troops!).

He gave a quick overview of what makes games work.

1. Starts with an invitation to begin
2. Boundaries [magic circle], what will happen
3. Rules are key — what is fair and what is not?
4. Goals — what is the end point you’re reaching out for? (Gamification is based largely on this)
5. Competition — we naturally compete, so that type of environment can help with play. But  it’s not only option — collaboration is also a important alternative (the board game Pandemic is a great example of this). The leaderboard can draw people to that and neglect experience — people also like to work together!

Moving on to playing in the musical design —he believes we  can turn our users into maestros, as an expert Illustrator user is much like a musician! — Crumlish provided a range of analogies (frameworks set up the rules, you need a bit of chaos for creativity, as in jazz). However, for me, his utterly inspired point was that of creating tunable experiences:

You don’t need to create a perfect experience, but instead one that’s tuneable.

A great example of it is Twitter—you keep tuning it to get what you want (more/less). Extending the metaphor that musical ensembles are about “getting in tune” (choosing what key), he suggested that we choose to “ensemble play” in the key of a certain hashtag.

And for those who know anything about Crumlish — he’s known as an avid amateur ukulele player — yes, he finished up the talk with a tune.

Critical Thinking for UX Designers – Stephen Anderson

After sun- and T-shaped thinkers Stephen Anderson decided that it was time to introduce a new type: Z-shaped thinkers. According to him these are people who think beyond the obvious, people that dare to turn the challenge around and take it a step further. “When everyone zigs, zag.” The point that Stephen wants to bring across is that it’s not about the tools, it’s about the thinking process itself.

When looking at existing examples Stephen mentions people like Negroponte who dared to embrace the limitations of creating a laptop for children that would at max cost $100. Instead of being blocked by the constraints he managed to turn it around and create a really interesting laptop. Another hero of Stephen is George Lucas. When he started with the Star Wars movies nobody knew how they had to make it, but George Lucas simply said that they had to aim for the result they wanted to have and would find a way to reach it. This way of thinking makes it possible for us as UX designers to really take challenges on and make a difference. But what’s the way to do this?

As an example Stephen gave the audience a simple task. First he asked everybody to “Design a vase.” When people did this he turned the challenge around and showed everybody how you should look at the challenge: “Design a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.” This simple task really showed everyone what the right approach is. The question that follows this is whether or not a lot of designers ever get the room to rephrase a challenge like this… often the business has a clear description of what they want and it’s difficult to change things around. But that doesn’t mean we must avoid it. It means we need to understand the importance of it and should try and talk to the right people in the right language. And this is where Leisa Reichelt’s workshop on Strategic UX fits in perfectly.

Z-shaped thinkers…

• reframe the problem;
• explore many perspectives
• synthesize information
• embrace constraints
• challenge assumptions
• appreciate details

… in order to envision unseen opportunities.

Content Strategy — Kristina Halvorson

You know that world of junk that WAL-E lives in, picking up the odd interesting trinket? That’s the way content is these days on the web. Halvorson says that those odd trinkets are the occasional piece of good content she finds in her travels as a content strategist.

With that sobering metaphor in mind, she talked us through the realities of content and content strategy these days:

• The elephant in the room of any conversation is where the content for a site will come from and how it will be maintained. To make matters worse, web writers are normally brought in far too late into the picture.
• Content is not copywriting, The content goes into a messy ecosystem, and has a lifecycle.

So what is content strategy? He colleague Melissa Rach has the following definition:

Content strategy helps figure out how content will help you meet your business objectives

Halvorson sums Content strategy  up as plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content. (Note, it’s a verb, not a noun). Or the below diagram:

She points out that while the field has been around for fifteen years, it’s only been recently that UX has started to pay attention to it, perhaps because it never seemed relevant. Even now she points out that UXers may think they don’t have do deal with workflow and governance. However, they do have to ask the right questions.

• Demonstrate — hold a mirror up to their pain. She showed an example of  history.com showing Valentines Day content on the 16th of February, and a paralysing data-dump of all categories.
• Recognize the life cycle of content — there are a whole lot of models as to the hoops content has to jump through, but it’s most important to understand which must be changed regularly, and by who.
• You need strategy and tactics. As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”
• Quoting  some well known professionals goes a long way to supporting your arguments.
• Draw — pictures are good.
• Envision. Decide the picture you want to aim towards.

Discussing the conundrum of CMS’s (and their somewhat failed promise), she recommends the blog CMS Myth.

The Cross Channel Experience – Nick Finck

Ninety percent of businesses say the cross-channel experience is critical to their business success. Nick Fink talked to us about definitions, methods, tools and examples to help us create a seamless customer/user experience (he believes the names don’t matter as the goal is the same). We need to answer the question: “What is it that we need to do to (sell a bike/let people enjoy a conference)?” and create a seamless experience for our products and services.

Businesses and also UXers tend to think in channels, but customers don’t. They don’t think in the silos that businesses create and perceive one business through different channels or touchpoints. So it’s important to craft a coherent cross-channel experience.

But how can we do this? Of course we need to gather insights on how people use our products and services. We have to pay attention to detail and look for hacks: e.g. what do people add to a product to enhance the experience. And we need to follow the experience through to the last point and learn the business process behind it. Once you’ve gathered the insights you can create a customer journey map, an experience map or a service blueprint, all of which help you to visualize the cross channel experience.

Finck takes Netflix as a good example, because they have matched the different touch points in such a way that the system is pro-active: It knows when you’ve had a problem with its service and proactively compensates you for it. It informs you when it sends a movie or received one back from you and will allow you to engage with its services on any device (iPhone, iPad, TV, laptop, …) This is a sign that Netflix has aligned its stage and backend to serve their audience a seamless experience.

The question of businesses is: ” How do we do this?” We need a strategy.

• Break down silos;
• Different disciplines need to work together and co-create the experience;
• We need to have a unified vision of what we’re trying to do.

It’s great that Nick Finck talks about the experience beyond the screen, and the theme of breaking down silos is definitely a recurring theme at UXLX (see also Louis Rosenfeld’s talk). As UX’ers we have the skills and tools to help break down the walls, so let’s go out and do it.

Cage Match: Mobile web vs Native Apps — Josh Clark

Let’s get rrrrready to rrrrrrrumbleeeeee!

I was getting really excited when I heard the title of this talk (rescheduled from Jeff Veen because of illness).Josh’s presentation was really set up as a match— from the premise, right through to the imagery of each slide (each with some old skool wrestler, boxer or luchadore in a position that reflects the context). I always like guys who put something “extra”, some delighters, in their presentation.

The presentation is not backed up by statistics or real life examples, but consists of observations and temporary technical restraints that both contenders inhabit.

Josh shows the audience two different commercials. One for the iPhone 4 app “Facetime” in which we see smiling people sharing emotions with each other:

Then he shows us the commercial for the DroidX phone, in which astronauts find a strange device in space. Within this device they find a phone that kinda integrates with the astronauts arm and forms itself into an Android phone. Did I hear a nerdgasm?

The different cultures couldn’t be clearer —  iPhone is about emotion, Android features and technology. So making an app for iPhone or Android can be based on your marketing strategy or the way people would want to use the app.
Then there is the mobile web. “It’s webtastic. Everybody loves her”. That is because you only need to make one app and your done. You have an instant reach of everyone who owns an iPhone or Android phone (Josh briefly addresses Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7, but they are irrelevant to the point).
So, if everything is a match, there has to be a winner, right? No.
There is no winner. Both contenders have their strengths and weaknesses, so it’s comparing apples to oranges.
But Josh has a very strong point of view that in order to be something in the world of mobile devices, you should at least have a mobile website. And on top of a mobile website you could, for example, create an app for your most precious customers; an app that provides them with something handy and unique.
Josh declares a winner that, in my opinion, is no contender in this match, but plays a whole different sport: the API. True, when you have a good API, building a mobile site and native apps is a breeze, but for me, this outcome was a bit disappointing, given the premise of the talk.

• Apps need an appstore, websites do not.
• Apps can make money pretty quickly, websites not so.
• Apps have great UX, websites not so.
• Apps have to be downloaded, websites work right away.
• Apps need to be updated manually, websites can be updates as much as you want without having to bug the user.
• Apps are about doing things, websites are about reference.
• Apps have great word-of-mouth, websites not so.
• Apps can speak with each other, websites not.
• Developing an app is a pain, building a website is not; in fact, prototyping a mobile website is a breeze.

So both have their advantages and weaknesses, no shocker there. But why not make an app that hold a frame which hold a mobile website? These Hybrid apps can work and you would have best of both world… right? Not exactly. The problem with an app is that is has to feel like an app. And an iPhone app feels differently from an Android app. So your mobile website must behave accordingly. Ofcourse this can be resolved by creating two mobile websites.

Ding ding ding! But we want a winner!

The Manual of Detection — Dario Buzzini

For his talk, Dario Buzzini used the detective novel “The Manual of Detection” as a guide to UX practice, backed up with examples from his work at IDEO.

Starting with the poetic (and somewhat provocative) statement: “We designers, we write stories not manuals, we design experiences not procedures, strive for beauty not truth”, he picked 11 quotes from the book that had relevance to UX.

1. On Shadowing — it’s not about being unremarkable but appearing as if you’re meant to be there (like a shadow)
   In relation to skills needed in a job — you need to have more than one in order to seem as if you should be there!
2. On Language — As an investigator, you need to know how to talk the right languages, objects have memory, too.
   Surgery situation — the nurse is touching the patient’s hand not only to comfort them, but also to measure anaesthetic. realised in surgery situation that the gadget for the nurse with stylus would eventually be used just with thumb!
3. On Leads — follow them, to let them go.
   Often your first idea may be the best, but it can’t be your only one. IDEO has a parking lot for ideas on their whiteboards, so that designers get their ideas out and move on.
4. On Documentation — most is for the wishing well, not a file .
   Buzzini stressed that should be actionable (echoing Dan Brown’s talk on documentation the day before).
5. On Nemeses — important to find your opposites.
   IDEO create partner teams for projects (apps etc) where both sit and work together. Can be difficult but helpful.
6. On Bluffing — If you’re caught in a lie, lie again.
   “Designers Lie. [laughter] Designers *sometimes* lie”. Sometimes your clients don’t need to know the truth so much as get a feel for an approximation. IDEO made a physical obstacle course for phone provider to show the hurdles customers had to go through to get a contract. The client got it. [Don Norman later commented that marketers lie and thus are successful. Designers are too honest for their own good!]
7. On interrogation—the process begins long before you are alone in a room together. By then, you should already know your answers.
   User research starts before talking — what people say is very different from what they do. Buzzini once interviewed a woman with limited dexterity who said that she had no problem opening pill jars. How she opened them? “I cut it open, how else would you do it?”
8. Cryptology — be careful what you dig up, it’s yours.
   Designers haven’t helped people with banking, making it hard for them to understand what happens with their money. Banksimple is using diagrams to help with that.
9. On Solutions — a good detective tries to know everything, a great one knows just enough to see him through to the end.
   In UX, this is about prototyping — you just have to choose and work smart. A good example for prototyping is Liveview App that lets you send a screencast to an iOS device
10. On Dream Detection — be careful to check whether what you’ve seen is real or a fallacy.
    Check exactly who it is you’re designing for.

Living With Complexity — Don Norman

In his keynote speech “Living With Complexity” (based on the book of the same name), Don Norman urged the audience to understand the difference between the complicated and complex, think about where the complexity is in any system, and to think signifiers, not affordances. Some of his findings were:

Another interesting tip he provided was to think about where the complexity occurs in a product system (aka Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity). For example, with coffee machines, in a manual it occurs with the user (making the coffee), a semi-automatic in the machine, a pod model in the packaging.

He finally echoed other speakers such as Halvorson with his reminder that it doesn’t matter if a design is bad unless it starts to affect sales.

——–

By the end of the day, most people had managed to collect most (if not all) of their UX Trump Cards (apparently Bill Buxton and Robert Hockman Jnr were particularly hard to find) and Mental Notes mini-sets. While the fabulous location was a given, UXLX excelled in running a tight ship — speakers were kept to time so the four rooms never got out of sync, a common problem with conferences — and a line up of quality speakers. It’d be great to see some more local/European speakers (a prime example was how Netflix — a service that isn’t available in Europe— was used as a case study several times), but given the diverse crowd, hopefully some will cross the line from participant to speaker next year.

Trading cards of UX luminaries was well under way by day 2 of UXLX. Today, we had topics ranging from site strategy to comics.

Strategic User Experience – Leisa Reichelt

In this workshop Leisa Reichelt takes on a huge challenge: she tries to clarify what strategic UX actually involves and how it can help us as designers create better experiences. One of the first challenges she needs to take on is the explanation of strategy itself. For a lot of people this is a very vague thing, even for those high up in organizations. Too often making a profit is seen as the strategy of a company, while in fact this is only a possible result of it. To know what the strategy of a business is we have to look at its purpose, which should always lie outside of the business itself.

Strategy is often mixed up with tactics, so Leisa gives us a very simple example:

• Strategy: we need to take the hill, men
• Tactics: fat guys go behind rocks, skinny guys behind trees

After this she continues and gives her definition of strategic UX: “UX activities focusing on achieving a significant organizational goal where a digital interface is a significant aspect of the product or service offering.” So when we really want to make a difference as designers and not only want to design the shell we should start getting involved on the correct level and try and talk on a strategic level. But before we all get enthusiastic Leisa warns us that this is very difficult to do, since a lot of managers in high positions only want to talk to people who (in their eyes) understand business and they don’t believe that designers can do that. One tip is to move away from our solution and design based position and move towards becoming facilitators. We are great in listening and translating what others think, want and need and formulate it in a clear way. And if you are able to introduce UX attributes in the process to help clear things up that is a win-win situation, especially when the managers feel that it’s actually a business attribute.

During her talk (the session didn’t really turn into a workshop, but was actually a 3-hour presentation) Leisa showed us the different levels in the process where we as UX designers can get involved. She described three levels:

• Business strategy: value proposition/experience strategy, product description, target audience, business model
• Customer experience strategy: experience map & touchpoints, personas, design principles, KPIs & metrics
• Tactical execution: prioritization, strategy led design, design evaluation, methodology

Leisa took on a challenging subject, but really managed to bring an important message across. At the same time there is still so much we need to learn and understand that you can fill a book with it, and fortunately that is something Leisa is working on at the moment.

Know Thy User: Personas — Steve Mulder

Anyone who’s come near a Cooper book (and a lot who haven’t) will know of those famous yet much debated method known as personas. Steve Mulder’s informative presentation got down to the nuts and bolts of using them, from large scale surveys to life-size cutouts.

Mulder stepped through the foundational reasons that we need personas (business results depend on satisfying users, you are not your user, learning about users requires direct contact, knowledge about users must be actionable, decisions should be based on users) and then suggested that personas are defined by three things

1. goals
2. behaviours
3. attitudes

The session was filled with useful tips for using personas. Some of them included:

• Surveys — aim for 100+ completios per segment, make it less than 15 minutes long, ask about behaviour (not importance), clear, familiar language…. use scales (not y/n), randomise answers when appropriate, don’t avoid open-ended input fields, break up into pages.
• Competitor analysis pages can include how they relate to various personas (i.e alongside all the other checklists have ones for the personas).
• Persona pages should have realistic photos (cheap or free sites for images include http://www.sxc.hu http://morguefile.com http://istockphoto.com). Other interesting ideas include writing the mini-story in first person so the persona is talking to you.
• My favourite tip was about the roll-out of personas. While you can do the standard one page summary, other more creative methods include making cards, life-size cut-outs (not for everyone but interesting), making a persona space where you deck out a cubicle as it would be for a persona, newsletters, and having the persona faces in the top left of all your wireframes to remind you who you’re designing for!

There was also a lot of discussion about how to bring in personas into a workplace not particularly amenable to them — much like Leah Buley’s talk the day before, the answer given was to quietly start using them and then air them if they show success.

Site search analytics – by Louis Rosenfeld

One of the morning workshops was held by the renowned Louis Rosenfeld in his role as “ information therapist” as he put it. The topic was site search analytics: what to make from the stuff people type in the search bar of your website. That ‘stuff’ can be quite interesting, because it indicates what users want, as opposed to what they need from a stakeholders’ point of view. If you bring those two together, you can greatly improve on your content as well as your search.
Search queries, because they are peoples’ own words, are semantically rich data. To get a feel for that he did an exercise and let the audience play around with a query data file in Excel to see what could be extracted from that. One group came up with an impressive correspondence analysis. What this really showed was that with little effort you can start making quite a difference.
After the break he presented an interesting case study from Vanguard which showed how multiple metrics can back up a feeling that something could be wrong with your new search engine. He rounded up with some practical tips on how to make site search better and get others in your company involved as well. All in all a great introduction on this fairly new subject.

Lessons from Bill Hicks — Ian Fenn

Ian Fenn beat the post-lunch slump with his entertaining — and more insightful than you might expect — video-packed ode to great comedian Bill Hicks. Fenn actually had the fortune to inverview many years ago in his then role as a BBC radio reporter and was impressed with ever since, but realised many of the skills that made him a great comedian could be applied to UX. His Lessons from Bill Hicks were:

1. Be honest. “Sometimes you have to tell stakeholders your baby’s ugly.” Hicks’ could be outrageous, but he was always honest.
2. Do your research. Get your facts straight, and above all be clear rather than dumbing down. (Hicks could also do devastating political comedy since he did his research and pulled no punches).
3. Actively listen. Change if the audience isn’t listening to you. Hicks was a master at reading the audience and changing his tack on the fly if need be.
4. Switch perspective. Comedy is about the unexpected, and Hicks could easily make fun of both sides of a particular issue, such as smoking.
5. Refine your work. Comedians work at their act for a long time — Hicks’ “How Tall Are You” skit was refined over 30 years!
6. Tell Stories. Great comedians know how to spin a story, such as Hicks painting a vivid picture about how weed should be legalised!
7. Have a vision. Jared Spool talks a lot about this in UX. Hicks usually finished his show on an inspiring note, with all his ideas about how we might have a better world — having that dream can inspire others too.
8. Leave a legacy. This has also been talked about in UX — what will you leave behind? Hicks died in 1992 age 32, but even now there’s eleven thousand clips of his on Youtube, and he’s mentioned on Twitter every 15 minutes. To top it off, a documentary on him was released last year. His legacy lives on.

Fenn talked about sharing the stage with Hicks, and part of the fun was (usually NSFW!) clips. Check out the Hicks’ movie trailer for a feel for them.

Product Personality — Jeroen van Geel

Our very own Jeroen Van Geel but the lightning in lightning talks as we went through a fast paced presentation about cars, cigarette ads and Craiglist .
Product personality is more than just Henri the vacuum cleaner. Many products have a strong personality — be it an HP laptop and the OLPC or the new VW Beetle — but in all too many cases on the web, all pages in a specific category look the same (be it travel sites or car ones).

Why use product personality? Van Geel recommends reading The Media Equation to understand just how important the connection is, but the key reasons are:

• Humans automatically attribute human behaviour to everything
• People prefer like-minded personalities [and products] (there is a famous computer test where people were asked to use choose between two identical computers, one named Linus and the other Max. People chose the one that was most like them).
• Undiluted product personalities are more trusted than contradictory ones (having a defined personality and sticking to it makes it seem more reliable)
• People judge on first impression

Some good examples come from the branding world. Cigarette brands often had very strong personalities (the Lucky Strike personality is very different from Malboro), and cars have a long history of it as well (take the Alfa Romeo and the VW Beetle). These products have values that are used everywhere.

But there are examples from websites.

• Whitehouse.gov in the Bush era was formal, authoritative, traditional, old fashioned; the new one is still authoritative and traditional, but is now also more caring.
• Ebay’s colourful new site is personal, confident, fun. Craigslist, on the other hand, looks very different and comes across as pragmatic, independent, no-nonsense, unorganised, a friend helping you out. It’s key to realise that though Craigslist site looks cheap, the company has made an active decision to have it that way, and benefits by thus appealing to a different audience.
• Finally this can be applied on a micro-level, Amazon and Woot’s sign up pages are very different — the former uses formal language and red text for required fields, the latter chatty and understated text.

There’s a whole area that this can step off into — a question was asked about the personality of interactions — but it was yet another reminder of the importance of meaning and storytelling in UX.

Sell yourself better – by Jason Masut

This really was a lightning talk as no second got wasted as Jason ran us through his UX Portfolio tips. Drawing from 10 years of experience and seeing lots of bad portfolios (80% of recent ones) he sparked the discussion about improvement at IA London and came up with some tips.
His tips in short:

• a proper introduction of yourself, at least descriptive and well structured, if possible enhanced with things like a visual design touch, quotes from others or an infographic about yourself
• demonstrate how you work, which means the process and not only end results. To do so photograph your workshops, keep some of your sketches and outputs and edit some video, e.g. on paper prototyping.
• share your project experience, with attention to all phases of the design process. Don’t do an exhaustive summary and show deliverables as well.

A good portfolio is always useful, not only if you want to look for a new job. It can help you to remember and improve on what you’ve done before and can be helpful for others as an example.

To get you started: Jason’s tips are available on www.betteruxportfolios.com

See What I Mean: Communicating with Comics — Kevin Cheng

Comics are a great tool to communicate concepts, visions and other complicated stories. They are easily understood by people and can depict a lot of detail in just a few tiles. Drawing comics forces a designer to really think about the message that he wants to bring across. They force you to think about what’s the essence of the message you want to convey and at the same time it’s possible to leave a lot of details out and still get a clear image. This last part is because people automatically fill in the blanks. During the workshop Kevin showed us several examples where these techniques were applied and he had us draw stick figures, facial expressions and in the end an entire comic.

But the main message of Kevin’s presentation is not aimed on drawing techniques, but at the message that comics can bring across. In a series of slides he shows us examples of comics that are focused on product features, introduced entirely new products and attempted to explain very complicate technical issues to a non-techy audience. One of the more interesting examples here is the Chrome comic which was used to explain the benefits of the Chrome browser to a broad audience.

Chrome

Depending on the role in the company that you have there can be different reasons to use comics:

• CEO, decision maker: distill a vision and share it across the organisation;
• Marketer, sales, business development: get the attention of potential clients and customers;
• Engineer, design: crystallise problem and solutions and get team feedback;
• Product manager: compact reminder to keep focus on vision.

With sun, sea, and a tropical 30 degrees C outside, no wonder people kept  saying that UXLX felt like a vacation. You might think it a pity to be indoors. Luckily day one of the conference kicked off with some cracker material that justified staying inside.

Storytelling for User Experience – Whitney Quesenbery

One of the first workshops of the day was kicked of by Whitney Quesenbery. In her workshop she tried to teach the audience the importance of telling stories during the design process, both to clients and team members. One of her main messages is that stories aren’t a broadcast transmission, but always create a connection between the audience and the storyteller:

• the storyteller shapes the story;
• the audience form an image;
• the storyteller and the audience affect each other;
• the most important relationship is between the audience and the story.

When a UX designer did research and shares his knowledge with the team stories can be a great way of doing this. When done right the storyteller retells the important parts of the stories the users told him, thus creating a connection between the design team and the user.

In order to become good storytellers we first must learn to become active listeners. We need to really be willing to hear the story people (users) are telling us and understand what’s it all about. Being an active listener means we have to encourage the story to be told further, by asking open questions and giving non-verbal feedback.

During the workshop Whitney actively involved the audience by giving several tasks. She focused on the following subjects:

• Story structure: structures give the story a shape and help the listeners/readers to understand it better. Is it a me-they-me structure, do you want to turn it into an adventure structure or should it be a contextual interlude? The way you set the story up can help engage people in the right way and lay focus on the right part of the story (like the product, the user or the process);
• Story context: context grounds the story in a specific place and time. You may want to emphasize (or change) the location, time, history or something else to help the listeners to understand it better.
• Purpose in UX: stories help drive UX work in several different ways. Do you want to share a success story and share what made this product so great or is the focus of your story to facilitate a brainstorm and do you want people to think in a different context?;
• Format of the story: there are many ways to tell a story, you can decide how. Is it written or drawn like a comic? Should it be a formal presentation or a light conversation starter?
• Imagery: imagery gives the story emotional resonance. By adding details about the sounds, smell or motion of the environment or a specific person you can pull the listeners into the world you are creating.

These tasks were closely linked to the book she wrote with Kevin Brooks called Storytelling the User Experience., so if you want to know more I would definitely check it out (also check out our excerpt). All in all it was a very interesting workshop with loads of stories. And as Whitney said: “what is design but a story?”

Become a UX Team of One – Leah Buley

UXers may know about being asked if you’re an innie or an outie, but if Leah Buley’s research catches on, you might also be a giraffe, bee, beaver, or penguin. Confused? They sum up the types of people that might be described as a UX Team of One. In her interactive and workshop with a lot of new material (such as I can’t find pictures of the gorgeous icons she used for each animal), she took the group through planning their futures, and thinking about ways to combat issues as the lone UXer.

However, her outstanding and memorable takeaway (including beautiful icons sadly not caught on camera but bound to end up on badges) was that of the four types of UX Teams of One. She sees them as a spectrum (most of us start at number one and move down), and classifies them as the following:

1. The Crossover (giraffe) has recently come over from another field. (Their long neck is from foresight).
   As their challenge relate to focus, access and skills, the strategies are to do with collaborating and DIY research. A key point to remember is that clients won’t allow for research do it should just be built in or ‘done on the sly’ (our podcast with Sam Lader on design research also talks about this).
   Some methods include using MAYAs Heuristic Markup, The Five Second Test, and competitor images (even getting the clients to collect them as homework!)
2. The Doer (a bee) is a knowledgeable person in a company without a UX department — they usually have to do things beside UX or move departments a lot. As they are held back by being brought on too late, or not valued, they need strategies to focus on professional relationships, visibility, and ROI.
   Some relevant methods included Liva Labate’s UX Health Checkup, product definition workshops (stakeholders repeatedly draw and disucss their product vision, as after a couple of rounds they’ll be far more aligned) and “Lunchtime UX” listening dates with other key team members.
3. The Builder (beaver) has been in UX for while on point of starting UX team.
   As their issues relate to relationship management and politics, the strategies are to align with business and build out a team. Methods included ongoing internal surveys, case studies and pre-meetings (1-to-1 reviews of docs with each key stakeholder before a key design review)
4. The Independent (lonely penguin): those that are freelance etc. Literal team of one
   They need to promote themselves, be legally savvy, and set their own terms (e.g. using a project brief). What’s more, they need to be known for something (as Leisa Reicht has blogged about).

Buley has been evangelising the UX Team of one for a few years now, but those who saw her talk a while ago (or looked at the slides) should definitely see it again as there is a whole lot of new information in preparation for her book-in-progress of the same name.

Skeuomorphs: The Good, The Bad, and the Silly – Andrew Watterson

Skeuomorphism is the act of using cues from the old to make new things feel more familiar. It has been applied for a very long time and can in our practice be a great way to introduce people to new technology and interactions. Some of the better known examples of skeuomorphs are the sound of digital cameras when you take a photo and the fake engine sound electrical cars make so that you can hear them approach.

When launching a product with a totally new way of interacting, like the iPad, you see that skeuomorphism can be an easy way to let people get used to the device. Watterson gives examples like the bookshelf in iBook and the old fashioned look of the contacts page. But at the same time he points out that there is still a lot of debate whether this approach is really the best way to go. There are a lot of people who have strong opinions for or againts, like our writer Rahul Sen is the recent article ‘The IxD Bauhaus: What Happens Next?’  I believe that there is a balance and that skeuomorphism can definitely be a good thing, but that we should always try to keep challenging ourself to also look at different ways of approaching the interactions. It’s just one way to reach what we want, but surely not always the only and best one.

Watterson’s conclusions regarding to this topic:

• Use skeuomorphs to add a satisfying and nostalgic emotional effect;
• Bridge gaps between what people are used to and a new method with skeuomorphs;
• Question whether you’re skipping the opportunity for innovation by using a skeuomorph;
• Don’t mismatch your functionality with a skeuomorph.

Picking your Neurosurgeon’s Brain— Susan Dybbs

For most of us, the closest we get to seeing what happens in an OR is through TV shows. However Susan Dybbs showed us not only what a surgeon sees when they’re carrying out telesurgery, but how we can use participatory design methods to understand highly expert and tacit processes.

Starting with Terry Winograd’s observation that designers have limited time to process things like how something feels like is in the tacit domain, Dybbs pointed out the issues that designers have when trying to create interfaces for highly expert systems such as telesurgery interfaces — the designer can’t get anywhere near the understanding that the users have of what happens and what is working. She resolved this by reating a toolkit of a mockup process with clipping (words, chunks of information, pictures of xrays etc) and then got surgeons to talk/make through their experience of surgery.

One of the most interesting insights from this method was being able to show the difference between what users say they need and what they actually use. In the case of surgeons, this might be documentation that is for legal reasons but never used in actual surgery, information they didn’t actually need (surgeons thought they needed to see the room view but actually didn’t) and vice versa (e.g. sideness — which side of the body you’re operating on, is a minor but key piece of information in helping a surgeon orient themselves with telesurgery).

Her tips for best practices:

• Create a toolkit (nothing is more scary than a blank piece of paper)!
• Do your research (sort original themes)
• Precondition your participants (e.g. photojournal, or just storytelling/pre-interviews)
• Keep it rough + impermanent
• Think aloud (helps show mental models)
• Be flexible (e.g. meet people at their comfort zone — help them make collage if they don’t want to do it).

Creating the Ultimate Experience: UX + CX + CRM — Stuart Cruickshank

Can you have a relationship with your oven? Stuart Cruickshank argued that you could. How? Through a combination of acronyms: UX, CX (customer experience) and CRM (customer resource management).

CRM has traditionally looked at strategy, business, and technology, but thanks to social media, a new branch of this known as Social CRM has emerged that also looks at engagement and conversation through empathy, emotion, authenticity, transparency. A great example of a company using social CRM is Zappos — their model means that their customers have a great experience and feel empowered, while the company gains advocates and profit (they have no marketing budget!)

On that oven? The Art Home Electrolux project attempts to do this (an exciting restaurant in Paris uses all Electrolux products, and the cook provides tips about cooking, meaning the customer could go home and cook what they got at the restaurant, as well as continuing the conversation through social media.

After a lot of conferences talking about service design, it was refreshing to have an alternate take on service systems UX could get involved with. As Cruickshank pointed out that the end of the talk, while CX and CRM have more visibility at the corporate level, at the end “experience is the goal”.

For those interested in the topic, he highly recommends Paul  Greenberg’s CRM at the Speed of Light (4th Edition).

Effective Design Documentation Without a Fuss — Dan Brown

Despite the growing interest in living prototypes for UX, it looks as if design deliverables won’t be going away any time soon. Dan Brown (who we interviewed earlier this year) tried to trick the attendees into saying it might be or otherwise, but most UXers know to always say “it depends”!

What is design documentation? Brown defines them as “an artefact, defined by a team, to create a project, whose purpose is to move a project forward.”

He suggests that many designers forget to think about purpose and progress (at worst making some projects stand still), as above all, documentation should inspire action.

Brown breaks down design documents into different types: clarifying approach, justifying decisions, comparing multiple approaches. Each of these should be handled differently, just as your structure should change if you’re writing for a different audience (e.g. developers vs C-level).

He finished up with a look through the Eight Shapes Unify system he took part in creating. His rationale for the system is that most existing templates in Word etc are a waste of time as they force you to fill in blanks.

The best takeaway in regards to writing was to “be a journalist not a comedian” — in other words summarise first rather than having it at then end (common in comedy but in journalism known as burying the lead).

Designing by Doing: Bringing Agile Thinking to UX Practice – Anders Ramsay

Agile development is one of the hot topics in todays UX scene, so several talks at the conference today focused on this topic. In Anders Ramsay’s workshop he didn’t jump into the agile process itself, but used the approach of agile thinking and showed how we as designers can use it in our day to day practice. He did this by giving several tasks:

• Paired interviews: this method comes from paired programming, where two programmers sit behind one screen and together write the code. In paired interviews you let two users interview each other instead of you interviewing them one by one. According to Ramsay this is a great way of getting insights you would normally be unable to collect, since the users themselves know what to talk about and what is interesting to know. By letting them conduct the interviews and write down the interesting material you can collect great amounts of raw data in a short time;
• Agile personas: in agile development you don’t design all the details at once and you try to minimize the amount of documentation. The idea behind agile personas is to create very light-weight artifacts out of research data (like you collected through paired programming). By letting the entire team check the raw data and detect trends you are able to share with them important insights. When you after that write the agile personas (real name, main characteristics and quotes) you have a great starting point for your future discussions;
• Story flows: use some of the user stories you collected in your user research and prioritize them. After this you can start adding tasks to each story and prioritize these as well. Even when you are not doing scrum you can still use story flows to get a good overview of what you want to create and especially what’s the most important thing to do first.

Ramsay’s workshop was very engaging, although a bit chaotic. He was well able to show everybody the power of agile thinking, although there are still so many other things to agile thinking that would have been worth sharing… one of the aspects I find most interesting is the daily standup with the entire team, to get a good feeling of what the current progress is. You don’t need to scrum to have the benefits of this way of working together as a team.

Trust is an important aspect in day-to-day life. Most of our personal relationships are build on it and our best relationships highly depend on it. In fact: trust makes us put extra effort into our relationships. So why don’t we apply it more in the design of our services?
You don’t see it that often anymore: fruit or vegetables placed alongside a country road, unguarded. All you have to do is take the amount you want and leave money behind in a box. This system has been around for centuries and is an easy way for farmers to earn some extra money. It is completely build on trust. And the fact that the owner puts trust in me puts a smile on my face and makes me (and others) honor that trust.

I came across an even more special story about a shop owner in a small town (I can’t remember where I found the story). Whenever he left the shop during the day he didn’t close down. Instead he put a sign on the counter asking people to leave the money they owe. Nobody ever damaged the trust the owner gave them. Why? Because trust is a special thing.

What is trust?

There are many different interpretations of trust, but this is one I can agree on. Trust is:

• the willingness of one party (trustor) to be vulnerable to the actions of another party (trustee);
• reasonable expectation (confidence) of the trustor that the trustee will behave in a way beneficial to the trustor;
• risk of harm to the trustor if the trustee will not behave accordingly; and
• the absence of trustor’s enforcement or control over actions performed by the trustee.

Source: Wikipedia

But what does it give us back? According to the above description trust is a one-way thing: the trustor gives it to somebody else and becomes vulnerable… This feels very unbalanced. If we would open up all the stores in a city and let people put money on the counter we’d be pretty certain that within days the stores will be empty and the owners a lot poorer. A healthy relationship is well balanced and goes two ways: both parties are trustor and trustee. Putting trust in somebody isn’t an anonymous process, but only works when there is a clear relationship between two parties. As the trustor you must make it very clear that you are willing to put trust in somebody and that you are making yourself vulnerable in the process, but that when people honor that trust you are giving them something in return that’s worth their effort.

Design for a balanced trust

One of the best examples in this is Zappos.com, the online shoes and clothing store that offers free shipping both ways and has a 365 days no questions asked return policy. What they have to offer you is a huge collection of products that you can try out at home for free. All that they ask in return is that you don’t abuse their trust and that when you send something back you will return it undamaged. As you can see there is a clear balance between the trustor and trustee, it’s a win-win situation.

Another good example is the release of Radiohead’s 2007 album ‘In Rainbows’. When they released it they didn’t set a price, but instead asked their audience to pay whatever they wanted to pay for the album. They put trust in the honesty of the audience that if they liked the music they would pay a normal price for it. A lot of people and companies thought that Radiohead was crazy and would only lose money, but it paid off: ‘In Rainbows’ is Radiohead’s best selling album.

Turn it around

Recently the NY Times announced their paywall as a means of earning money from their users. This caused a lot of heated discussions. The main counter argument is the fact that everything has been free for ages and must suddenly cost money when you read too many articles. People acknowledge that the quality of the articles is worth money, but at the same time they feel mistreated and are finding new ways of getting free access. In my mind something is wrong with the trust balance: people do claim that they value the articles, but they hate the concept of the paywall. I would say that this is because people have the feeling that the NY Times uses force over trust. If they would turn things around and would ask for a reward (micro-payments) each time you liked an article they would have happier users and earn more in the process. The mistake is that they now force the masses that haven’t got a relationship with the NY Times (but only want cheap news) instead of building on the trust relationship they can have with the core of their users.

So, what now?

When you look at the current examples you immediately notice that these are both big players. You’ll probably think “They can afford to trust people and lose something if it fails, but most companies don’t have this luxury.” I don’t agree with this statement and believe that companies of all sizes can apply trust to build up a better relationship. All around me I see that trust is a wonderful thing when balanced. People don’t give it that easily, but when they do it’s important to cherish it with everything you’ve got.

Trust me on this.

What are your experiences on this topic? Do you know of any companies that use trust in their relationship? How would you design it into a service? I am really curious what your thoughts are on this subject.

Boarding passes. The stress of getting them in time, or remembering to print them out before you get to the airport, and not losing them. Can QR codes replace them?

Recently I went to Midwest UX in Columbus, Ohio and flew Delta for the trip. Checking in the night before, I was presented with a screen asking if I want my boarding pass:

• Printed
• Emailed to me
• Sent to my phone
• Saved to be printed at the airport

Curious, I chose to have the boarding pass sent to my phone. What I received was a text message to the Safari page below. Immediately I was intrigued. A QR code for my boarding pass? I had never seen any additional infrastructure at the terminals to account for this? But if it saves a few sheets of papers I’ll give it a go.

The Excitement

Going through security I held up my phone to a scanner a proceeded to the metal detectors. The same, at the gate, I loaded the web page and scanned my phone as I walked down the jetway. Smooth as could be, I was pleasantly surprised as the efficiency of the process. Neither security nor the gate attendants questioned my boarding pass, it was as if they expected it. This isn’t without complications though.

Where it Failed

Despite the streamlined workflow and the pleasure of not needing to us the walk-up-and-go terminals there are still a few places my digital boarding pass fell short.

Gate Number

Scroll to the bottom of the boarding pass, the gate number states Check Monitor. This makes sense a night before my flight, but again, when I checked the page at the airport it said the same. Digital boarding passes should provide accurate and current information. Tie the boarding pass to the main system and update me, in real time, of gate information and delays if appropriate. Don’t make me use one piece of technology to hunt around for another.

iPhone Lock

I have a password lock on my phone. Add this to the iPhone screen turning off (and locking) after a minute and timing is everything. I’m in line for security – wanting to make sure I have the boarding pass up when I get to the front of the line, but I don’t know when that will be. The same when boarding the flight. I don’t want to be that guy delaying boarding and I also dont want to keep toying with my phone just to keep the screen active. There needs to be a balance.

Overall this was a new and good experience as a part of my airline travelling experience. I challenge to look at the implications of technology though. If I am saving paper, alleviating lines at check in, can I get a fast track lane as a reward for my planning? Where can we leverage analog methods within a digital realm to streamline the experience further?

Here’s how it went as we reviewed the designs for the shopping cart with the client:

Stakeholder 1: What about when the customer realizes they are purchasing using the wrong contract? Can they change it here?
Designer: Not in this design. Is that something that they should be able to do at this point?
Stakeholder 1: Yes.
Designer: But then their prices will change. Right?
Stakeholder 1: That’s right. And they might have products in the cart that they won’t be able to buy on the new contract.
Designer: [internal dialog] #$%!
Stakeholder 2: What about the ‘prompt pay discount’? I see ‘discounts’ but does that include prompt pay?
Designer: What’s that?

It’s common knowledge (or it should be) that discovering requirements during page design  is a recipe for madness. But no matter how much we believe this and strive to avoid this, it still happens. We’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s quite natural for clients to recall an infrequently-used feature or edge case when they see a page design. In this case, it’s easy to blame the customer for not having their requirements defined and communicated. Surely, we’re the victims here.

The reality is that the problem is ours. We rush into the creative process without fully understanding everything that our solution needs to do. If we are going to be successful, we need to figure out how to hold our creativity accountable to the full demands and scope of these complex projects. Unless we take the lead in defining the full scope of these projects, we will never be successful.

Checklist Thinking and Accountability

Last year, one of our clients mentioned to me Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto”. She was reading it for its insights into health care. My insight was this: for our creativity to really deliver a solution, our deliverables cannot stand alone; they must work together as a related set of checklists. “Checklist thinking” makes the complex, enterprise-wide digital systems we work on much more manageable.

At my company and with our clients, I talk a lot about deliverables being “accountable” to other deliverables. I’ll use an example. In an Agile process, everything that takes place in a sprint is referenced back to one or more user stories. Our page sketches must address all of the user stories in the sprint. In other words, our sketches and page flows are held accountable to these user stories. Similarly, many software projects involve some listing of requirements. User stories should be held accountable to those requirements.

Checklists enforce accountability among deliverables. Framing our deliverables as checklists helps us do three things:

• First, we can lead our customers through the process of defining the full scope of complex digital systems.
• Second, we can hold our creativity accountable to everything required of the solution called for.
• Third, we can hold the customer accountable to their inevitable changes. We can always go back and say, “That’s a new user story that we haven’t discussed. Let’s get that on our list.”

This accountability allows our creativity to be truly effective.

Types of Checklists for Complex Digital UX Projects

A checklist can take many forms, but there are five that we find crucial for ensuring that design projects don’t spin out of control and that stakeholders and customers are held accountable to their earlier decisions.

Checklist #1: Scenarios
Checklist #2: Business Requirements
Checklist #3: Use Cases (or User Stories if you’re using Agile)
Checklist #4: Flow Maps
Checklist #5: Wireframes (or prototypes or sketches or whatever you use to define what happens on a page)

These are not new deliverables, and some of them are certainly not typically the domain of the interaction designer. Nonetheless, the trick is treating each as sequence of checklists and not just an exercise in siloed documentation or your own personal creativity. For example:

• Do the requirements (checklist #2) account for all of the scenarios (checklist #1)?
• Do the use cases (checklist #3) account for all the requirements (checklist #2) and scenarios (checklist #1)?
• Do the flow maps (checklist #4) address all of the use cases (checklist #3)?
• Have I created all the required wireframes or page prototypes (checklist #5) reflected in the flow maps (checklist #4)?
• Does my prototype (and any associated documentation) illustrate all the use cases (checklist #3) and scenarios (checklist #1)?

Key to success is public visibility of the connections among deliverables. For instance, when showing page flows, start by showing the user stories as a setup for the flows. Or if you are developing user stories, start by reminding everyone of the personas and scenarios. This ensures you have the best chance of making sure the next deliverable is as complete as possible. You also can more readily identify new scenarios, requirements, and user stories without feeling defensive, or like you missed something. If you’re doing this right, you should start to hear your clients say, “This sounds like a new user story!” when new functionality inevitably comes up.

Final Thoughts

The work we do does not yet have a clear place in the well-worn processes of complex digital systems. Others will not define it for us. We have to do it. Embracing the art of the checklist means figuring out how our deliverables fit with others. Treating deliverables as checklists for other deliverables is one way to ensure that what you do not only addresses the work that came before, but will inform and shape the work that is yet to be done.

These checklists are method-independent. If you’re doing waterfall, then use them for waterfall. If you’re doing Agile, then integrate them into your sprints. Checklist thinking allows you to slip into any of the reputable software-development methods without being “certified” in any of them. Checklist thinking keeps you focused on 1) what your deliverable needs to cover to be complete and 2) what your deliverable will be used for downstream.